Thursday, January 03, 2013

The disgrace of papal blessing for Ugandan homophobia (Opinion)

Earlier this past month, Pope Benedict XVI joined Twitter
in an effort to galvanize the faithful and modernize the Catholic
Church for a younger, increasingly secular generation, making him the
last person after your grandpa to join the social networking site.

The Vatican also hired a former Fox News correspondent to bring their communications strategy into the 21st century, since that network did such an impressive job during the 2012 US presidential election.

The
Catholic Church is foundering, and it'll take a lot more than 140
characters and a rightwing "news" hack to put it on a modern track.

The pope is a social issues guy, more interested in themes like "traditional" family values, gay marriage and abortion than, say, helping the poor.

And the Vatican is quick to slap down anyone – but especially any women, and particularly women who have the nerve to think of themselves as equal to men
– who focuses on helping the most in need, instead of crusading against
abortion and gay people.

As far as the Church is concerned, advocating
for the equal participation of women is "radical feminism" worthy of
condemnation; pushing for legislation that kills gay people is worthy of a blessing.

Yes,
that's correct: just around the same time the pope was drafting his
first tweet, he met with Ugandan parliamentary speaker Rebecca Kadaga,
who had earlier promised to level the death penalty for gays as a
"Christmas present" to the Ugandan people (minus, one assumes, the
Ugandans who will be murdered because of their sexual orientation). She
received a private audience with the pope, and a blessing.

Uganda
has been a target for western evangelicals who see that they're losing
the gay marriage battle in their own countries. Religious leaders and
rightwing groups, including Rick Warren and the National Organization
for Marriage, have gone to Uganda for years
to spread anti-gay propaganda and bolster homophobia.

These religious
leaders position themselves as experts, telling Ugandans that gay people
sodomize children, spread Aids, destroy marriage, break up families and
pose an imminent threat to society – and then they feign shock when
Ugandan leaders decide that the legal punishment most befitting these
child-raping, society-crushing individuals is death.

The pope – whose own track record on men who sodomize
children isn't exactly stellar – blesses one of the people whose hateful
policies not only provide social cover and justification for that
violence but, if enacted, would put state power behind the imprisonment
and execution of gay people.

The Church's obsession with policing
sexuality is nothing new: in fact, it's a centuries-old Catholic
tradition for the Vatican to poke its nose in your bedroom when it feels
its power is threatened. The early anti-sex crusades were focused on
women – and haven't let up.

Women were ordered to serve their husbands
and were barred from the priesthood.

Abortion was debated in Thomas
Aquinas's day – he thought the act was a sin against the marriage, and
that, of course, male fetuses were ensouled earlier than female ones –
and for a long while, the Church distinguished between early and
late-term abortions in terms of punishment.

But as the papal
states lost territory to Italy in the late 19th century, the pope came
down hard on women, declaring all abortion to be murder.

The Church, it
seems, is a bit like a schoolyard bully, needing to pick a scapegoat to
demonstrate its ultimate authority. Women have spent the past several
centuries serving as that target.

The Church extended its reach
into the sex lives of its followers (and of women, in particular) again
in the 1930s, when it issued its ruling on contraception for the first
time ever and deemed birth control incompatible with Catholic teachings
on life.

Right around that same time, the Church was dealing with what
it called the "terrible triangle" of anti-religious and anti-Catholic
actions in the Soviet Union, Mexico and Spain.

Desperate for a way to
show its power and control followers, the Vatican decided that it was
wrong to use anything other than crossed fingers to control the number
and spacing of your children.

Here's how successful they were: 99% of American women use birth control at some point in their lives, and Catholic women use birth control at the same rates as non-Catholics.

In nations where Catholicism
is deeply entrenched and abortion is illegal and birth control
difficult to access, abortion rates are some of the highest in the
world.

The only difference is that far more of the procedures are
unsafe, and tens of thousands of women die.

The lowest abortion rates in
the world can be found in the increasingly secular west European
countries where the procedure is legal and often covered by state funds,
and where birth control is widely accessible.

Realizing it was
losing followers and that most women weren't going to comply with the
birth control mandate, and recognizing the social upheavals taking place
through the 1960s, the Church re-evaluated its position – and doubled
down.

Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae restated the
Church's anti-contraception position, extended it to sterilization and
threw in some claims about the natural roles of women and men.

(The
natural role of celibate men who spend very little time with women is,
apparently, to tell all women what to do.)

The Church also took a
stand against abortion again, and declared that abortion couldn't even
be had in the case of an ectopic pregnancy where the fertilized egg will
never develop into a fetus.

In the late 1980s, under pressure from the
many nuns who have kept the Church functioning for centuries and were
pushing for equal rights and recognition, Pope John Paul II asserted
that women simply served a "different" role in the Church than men, but
one that was equally as important.

It was a nice little head-pat to
Catholic women, but ultimately a condescending one: does anyone actually
believe that there's power in subservience, and that being blocked from
all positions of real authority represents equal importance?

In
1995, again facing declining congregations, Pope John Paul II re-upped
the Church's hostility toward contraception, and further asserted that
condoms were verboten – at the very moment HIV and Aids were ravaging
nations around the world. The Church, ironically, categorizes
contraception and condoms as part of the "culture of death".

By
the Vatican's standards, taking a birth control pill or using a condom
is far more deadly than contracting HIV, or executing an actual person
for being gay.

As society has progressed, the Church has
responded by digging its heels in to maintain outdated, misogynist
social norms. And it has long used women's bodies as a tool through
which to exercise control in the face of waning influence.

Now, gay
people are being subjected to the same treatment.

As the Church
continues to recover from the international pedophilia scandal that its
priests perpetrated and the entire institution covered up, and as the
world's population increasingly flees from formal religion, the pope is saying that two men or two women falling in love threatens world peace.

A Twitter feed can't modernize an institution so out of touch with reality, with progress and with widely-accepted human rights norms.

If
the Church really wants to modernize, it could take a stand for the
rights of half the world's population, and give women equal say in the
Catholic hierarchy and over basic rights to their own bodies.

It could
promote condom use to save lives.

It could take a good hard look at how
its hunger for power and its authoritarianism enabled and covered for
sex criminals who targeted vulnerable children.

It could back up
out of our bedrooms and quit meddling in national politics, leaving its
believers the right to practice as they wish, without imposing its
strictures on the rest of us.

It could put its enormous resources behind
tried-and-true Jesus stuff like helping the sick and indigent, rather
than waging battles against nuns who don't hate gays enough.

I'm
not holding my breath for any of that.

But at the very least, the pope
could refuse to bless leaders who want to murder gay, lesbians and
transgender people for the simple crime of existing.

"Gay people have a right to life and dignity, and I oppose their persecution. #uganda," he could tweet.